Film Classics – Billy Wilder & The Apartment
Known primarily for the films that established him as a Hollywood insider — DOUBLE INDEMNITY, SUNSET BOULEVARD and SOME LIKE IT HOT — Billy Wilder’s career spanned five decades across Germany, France and the United States. This series will explore Wilder’s evolution from gentle ethnographer of modern life to caustic satirist of American society and the culture industry.
Series Events
Series Pass
Buy a pass to both sessions and receive a discount.
Tickets: $40 / $32 Avalon members
Buy Series PassThu, Oct 8, 10:30 am – 1:00 pm
This lecture will introduce Wilder’s career and body of work. We will focus on issues of authorship and reception, in particular Wilder’s exclusion from the auteurist canon that includes contemporaries like Alfred Hitchcock. We will also consider Wilder’s uneven relation to Hollywood genres and his systematic blurring of boundaries between comedy, romance, and drama, paying particular attention to THE APARTMENT as a (if not the) high point of his career.
Tickets: $30 / $25 Avalon members
Session 2: THE APARTMENT Screening and Discussion
Thu, Oct 15, 10:30 am – 1:30 pm
Wilder’s 1960 film won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay. Insurance worker C.C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon) lends his Upper West Side apartment to company bosses to use for extramarital affairs. When his manager Mr. Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray) begins using Baxter’s apartment in exchange for promoting him, Baxter is disappointed to learn that Sheldrake’s mistress is Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), the elevator girl at work whom Baxter is interested in himself. Soon Baxter must decide between the girl he loves and the advancement of his career. NR, 125 min, in English
Tickets: $15 / $12 Avalon members
Series Curator
Oliver Gaycken is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Film Studies at the University of Maryland College Park. He received his BA in English from Princeton University and his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He previously has taught at York University (Toronto) and Temple University.